Make-Work on the Nile

Monday, May. 10, 1971

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For many years, Egyptologists have puzzled over a major archaeological riddle. If each pharaoh built a pyramid for use as his own tomb and his eventual ascension to the sun, why are there more pyramids than there were pharaohs? British Physicist Kurt Mendelssohn believes that he has discovered the answer. Writing in American Scientist, he suggests that the pharaohs directed the construction of several pyramids at the same time to achieve maximum employment. Building the pyramids, in other words, may have been history's first great public-works project.

The Oxford University scientist, who is also an amateur archaeologist, came to his conclusion during a recent sight-seeing trip to Egypt. Straying slightly off the beaten tourist path, Mendelssohn visited the great pyramid at Medûm, one of the first built by the Egyptians, about 50 miles south of Cairo. Although archaeologists have long ascribed the ruined condition of the nearly 5,000-year-old structure to the pilfering of masonry by subsequent generations of Egyptians, Mendelssohn calculated that most of the stone missing from the pyramid was still near by, lying in huge mounds of rubble surrounding the rectangular inner core.

Giant Rockslide. That observation indicated that the damage had been caused by an accident rather than vandalism. Built at a time when the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt were just merging, the Medûm project represented an obvious attempt by the early pyramid builders to improve upon their first effort, the Step Pyramid at nearby Saqqara. Rather than settling for the stepped inner structure, as they had done at Saqqara, they covered the Medûm pyramid with a smooth mantle that on each of the four sides ascended at a steep 52° angle. But, Mendelssohn says, as the heavy mantle grew, the stresses became so great that it eventually came tumbling down in a giant rockslide.

The disaster at Medûm, Mendelssohn is convinced, caused consternation 30 miles away at Dahshûr, the site of the so-called Bent Pyramid. Some scholars have suggested that the Bent Pyramid's strange shape (its sides start up at an angle of 52°, but halfway to the top the slope changes abruptly to a more gentle 43½°) was brought about by the premature death of the pharaoh, which forced the workers to hasten completion of the pyramid. Mendelssohn, however, believes that the builders at Dahshûr, hearing of the avalanche at Medûm, prudently reduced the angle of the unfinished portion of their own pyramid to a safe 43½°. In fact, Mendelssohn notes, Egyptian pyramid builders did not return to the more dangerous 52° angle until many years later, when they had devised better techniques for construction of the outer mantle.